Of the Evil Empire, Imperialist Devastation
of Peoples and the Evils Done in Our Nameby Manuel Valenzuelawww.dissidentvoice.org
March 11, 2004First Published in
Axis of Logic

Let
us for a few moments put aside our lavish lifestyles of fortuitous endowment
and providence that have made us blind to the realities of billions of our
fellow humans. Let us ignore our plasma televisions, our DVDs, our
two-story cookie cutter homes and gas-guzzling SUVs. Let us promise to not
open our overstocked pantries and refrigerators, or to go out and eat at one
of many corporate controlled franchise restaurants offering vast assortments
of gargantuan meals. We should ignore the opulence of our society that
dwells permanently in our minds that makes us forget the severe indigence
and suffering that transpires beyond our shores and borders.

In short, we should come
out of our luxurious bubble that has shielded us from the evils inflicted on
billions of humans that have not been as privy to a life of safety and
security. Let us traverse the road of reality, sojourning through history
and through mirages of hidden truths. Let us dive into the making of the
Evil Empire so that we may see what our government has and continues to do
in our name. The road ahead will not be easy to swallow or comprehend, yet
we must open our minds to the possibility that what has happened is real and
what is occurring is not fiction. Only then will we understand why our
hands are smeared in the blood of tens of millions of human cadavers and
countless more whose lives and futures have been devastated at the hands of
the United States of America. Only by knowing who and what we are can we
correct ourselves.

Our society is ingrained
with an appetite for violence. It is apparent in the over 11,000 murders by
firearm per year. It is apparent in Hollywood’s gratuitous assembly-line of
blood and gore, violence, devastation and death. It is visible in the
ever-growing number of video games sold to our children depicting egregious
violence, killings and bloodletting. Our society celebrates violence, be it
through football, hockey or boxing, television, cartoons and music. Even
Disney cartoon movies have as a main theme battles of good versus evil and
the plethora of violence, destruction and death associated with them. The
US military industrial complex supplies the world with 45 percent of all
weapons for sale on the market.

Yet without public
demand for violence none of the above would exist. It is the citizenry –
with complicit help from government and corporate media – that drives the
engine that conditions us toward accepting and participating in our violent
society.

Violence in America is
today a manifestation of our society and history, of a never ending thirst
for blood, conquest, oppression and death that sprung from the first moment
of Puritan arrival. Before and after the Revolutionary war Americans
participated in one of the greatest acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing
the world has ever witnessed. Millions upon millions of native Indians were
slaughtered, raped and cleansed from the lands of North America. Manifest
destiny ransacked from Atlantic to Pacific like a devastating hurricane,
destroying everything native people thought precious and sacred. Wars
against native populations extinguishing the energies of men, women,
children and elderly alike. The American thirst for violence had been
born. The addiction for blood would become insatiable and never ending.

Native peoples’ lands
were taken from them; lies, manipulations and betrayals erased their tribes
from the homes they once knew and cherished. Replanted into hellholes
called reservations, Indians were left to rot away their existence, given
only the evil of Firewater to wash away their inner demons and scars in a
land both alien and inhospitable. Hidden from the voracious Anglo
onslaught, Indians of talent and ability were left to dwell on a future lost
through the disappearance of opportunity. Disease, depression, lack of
education and incessant poverty soon followed. Demons of a life wasted and
opportunity lost consumed those who escaped the barrel of a gun and the
virus of the white man.

Entire ethnicities,
tribes, languages and cultures were eviscerated from the face of the Earth
by those whose importance of property and ownership superceded the respect
for human life. Beautiful peoples took with them to the grave lives living
free, roaming pristine and untouched forests, deserts and prairies, being
one with nature, respecting everything that breathed and a spirituality that
has much to offer our capitalistic civilization. Advanced civilizations in
wisdom and spirituality, yet seen as savages to the “more sophisticated”
European people, native peoples’ way of life was vanished, never to fully
flourish again. Millions ethnically cleansed, millions whose lives were
made barren, all making way for the destructive bulldozer ravaging land and
man. The Evil Empire had sprung to life, a trail of victims visible
everywhere the giant walked.

Not satisfied with the
killing of millions of native peoples, the citizens of America next decided
to unleash hell onto each other. As a result the American Civil War of the
latter part of the 19th century killed more than 600,000 people,
leaving the United States mourning for brothers and sons, fathers and
grandfathers. Graveyards littered the landscape; battlefields were
transformed into fields of death and devastation. Divided a prospering
nation stood, soaked in blood and agony, splitting apart families, creating
widows and orphans. In the end, hundreds of thousands lay dead, many more
maimed and wounded, all to quench the voracious appetite for violence, death
and destruction.

The Evil Empire’s
cannibalism was only the beginning of a much greater disease.

Lands and People of Asia

As the Empire grew
stronger so too did its addiction for expansion. War with Spain commencing
in 1898 brought forth new lands, colonies and treasure. Yet it also brought
forth death and destruction. American violence had not dissipated; it had
only evolved, with new forms of warfare and destruction arising with the
passage of time. Tens of thousands died on both sides. In the end, the
United States had conquered both man and land, thereby increasing its power
and prestige. The Empire was growing, prospering and learning that force
was the means by which to achieve its ends. Force was weapons,
intimidation, violence and war. It was victory and imperialism. It was the
means to becoming the most powerful nation on the planet. The Evil Empire
had grown up, as the Philippines would soon learn.

In 1899 Filipino forces
seeking independence from Spain confronted in armed struggle American forces
intent on maintaining the colonization of the nation. A ruthless war of
attrition between the two forces began. For the next three years tens of
thousands of native resistance fighters died at the hands of the much more
technologically sophisticated and economically powerful American military.
Numerous war crimes were committed by American soldiers. Destruction and
looting of property, shooting of captives, rapes of women, torture of
prisoners and civilians, devastation of the environment and the forced
social engineering of the people were thrust upon the nation in an orgy of
occupier lawlessness.

In addition, over
200,000 civilians perished due to the brutal scorched earth policy
implemented by the US military that destroyed agriculture, fertile land and
villages. In addition, many thousands died from cholera arising out of
economic devastation of infrastructure. The harsh subjugation of the
Filipino people was a form of collective punishment that America used as a
weapon of war in order to pacify the independently minded population. The
American intervention in the Philippines indiscriminately erased from the
face of the Earth hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. This is
called genocide, and the Evil Empire got exceedingly good at it.

The reality of what
happened over 100 years ago is comfortably hidden away from us today. The
American war in the Philippines is today but an asterisk in our history
books, yet the gravity of the malevolence cannot be forgotten. It certainly
is not included in the educational material of our children, or in those of
our own childhood, however. Why is this? What the US government does in our
name cannot be made known lest the population rage in anger at the
wickedness that America exports abroad. Genocide, collective punishment,
scorched earth policy and ethnic cleansing leading to the deaths of hundreds
of thousands of human beings is not something to be proud of. Not when
Stalin, Hitler and the Nazis did the exact same thing.

In the Philippines the
Evil Empire was only getting warmed up. For the next 100 years it controlled
all aspects of the Philippine government. The US installed minions and
puppets that kept the populace in dire poverty, robbing the nation blind and
fostering an era of inept and corrupt leaders handpicked by America.
Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled as dictator of the beleaguered nation from 1965
until his ouster in 1986, is the best example of American complicity in the
utter devastation of both the people and economy of the Philippines.

Marcos ruled with
extreme harshness, subverting democracy, robbing the nation blind (some
estimates have him stealing anywhere from $3 to $30 billion dollars) and
killing thousands of dissenters and opposition members who dared speak out
against the injustices and inequalities. He brought onto the nation’s
masses untold suffering, indigence and slave labor, wages and conditions.
Hundreds of thousands have died form malnourishment, disease, poverty and
exploitation. The nation’s debt amassed under Marcos is today responsible
for the dire circumstances of the population, and is a reason for the growth
of Muslim and Marxist revolutionary groups prospering and threatening the
government.

The beneficiary of the
evil spawned by Marcos you may ask? The Evil Empire, which established
military bases that helped expand the Empire geopolitically, collected
hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, exploited slave labor for the
manufacture of cheap products sold back in the US and controlled a
subjugated populace through neo-liberal economic policies that privatized
and made available to American corporations national industries and
utilities. The Evil Empire and the Corporate Leviathan are one and the
same, after all, their interests not mutually exclusive.

The Evil Empire’s claws
of incessant violence soon expanded to other nations of Southeast Asia.
When its addiction for destruction was not satisfied with the firebombing of
Tokyo that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, it turned to that most
evil of human creations: the atomic bomb. After becoming the only nation to
ever use atomic weapons on innocent populated areas, killing hundreds of
thousands and unleashing utter devastation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
America soon launched its appetite for blood in the Korean Peninsula after
it entered the war, creating vast killing fields of both soldiers and
civilians. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on all sides perished along
with upwards of three million Koreans (North and South) who were caught in
the crossfire of ideologies and human wickedness.

Following the Korean War
America soon found itself immersed in yet another war, this time in
Vietnam. Decades of war led to the death of 58,000 American soldiers, over
100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and close to one million North Vietnamese
soldiers. Estimates place the number of civilian deaths at anywhere from
400,000 to two million. If the illegal American bombing of Cambodia and
Laos orchestrated by Henry Kissinger is considered, in which civilian
targets were selected and bombed, upwards of two million more Southeast
Asians can be added to the Evil Empire’s macabre statistics. Furthermore,
many more died as a result of the total devastation of land and
infrastructure the bombings and war created, including the continued death
and disease of land and man due to the lingering effects of Agent Orange and
through the enormous amount of unexploded bombs and ordinance still
littering the ground.

Indonesia is another
nation that, through the American imposed and supported dictator Mohamed
Suharto, suffered tremendously thanks to the meddling by the Evil Empire.
Under Suharto’s watch, anywhere from 500,000 to two million people were
killed in a 1965 alleged coup attempt, most of them dissenters, leftists,
communists or opposition members. In 1975, with American blessings and
weaponry, Suharto invaded East Timor in order to stop an insurrection by the
native people, killing 250,000 people out of a population of 650,000.
During Suharto’s stay in power he detained and executed hundreds of
thousands of Indonesian opposition members. His reign ended in 1998. During
this time corruption was endemic, as was the subversion of democracy,
freedoms and rights. In 1999 it was found that the Suharto family fortune
totaled $15 billion, most of it coming from those government funds created
thanks to international loans and the labor of the masses.

Lands and People of
Latin America

The Evil Empire’s
omnipotent reach has had devastating effects in Latin America as well. The
US government has interfered with the internal governance of several Central
and South American nations in its quest to maintain its form of democracy
and capitalism. The US has meddled in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama,
Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Brazil, not to
mention Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. The Evil
Empire has imposed coups and US friendly dictatorships and leaders in many
of the above mentioned nations. In Central America it supplied death squads
with military support and logistics. In Chile, Argentina and Brazil,
dictators, with the consent of their American masters, initiated a war
against leftist dissenters and opponents, leading to the disappearance of
thousands of men and women. In Panama, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA puppet,
betrayed his American masters and hell was unleashed on Panama City by the
US military. Anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 civilians died as the Evil
Empire pursued the capture of one man.

Today, the Evil Empire
is once more interfering in the destabilization of Latin American nations.
Haiti is but the latest but by no means the last country to be burned by the
searing claws of America’s might. President Aristide, a champion of the
poor and a seeker of equality and justice, stepped on US shoes with his
defiance of neo-liberal threats imposed on him by Haiti’s elite and the Bush
administration. In essence, he sealed his own fate, and the clandestine coup
sponsored by the US removed Aristide from office. As a result, Haiti, which
has been the slave shop for US corporations for decades, will remain poor
and exploited, a cesspool of poverty and hopelessness for its citizens.

Colombia has, thanks to
the US, become a militarized zone where hundreds of people are killed on a
yearly basis. Civil war has ensnarled the nation, instability runs amok and
the livelihood of rural peasants has been destroyed by the coca eradication
program enacted the America that has ruined arable land. With the potential
of large oil reserves present under the nation’s lands and the already
discovered exploitable natural resources prevalent throughout the
countryside, Colombia has become a target for US interests. Oil and energy
companies, along with their growing infrastructure, are already protected by
the US military as they continue their exploitation of the nation.

Meanwhile, the Evil
Empire already has its sites set on destabilizing Venezuela and a harsh
critic of the US, Hugo Chavez. Forces now at work, supported and maintained
by the US, are slowly setting in motion mechanisms that, it is hoped, will
unseat Chavez from office, whether by force or other means, thereby
installing a friendly US pro-neo-liberal puppet that will allow for the
pilfering of Venezuelan oil by the Evil Empire. A coup, assassination and
or invasion are not out of the realm of possibilities, especially when black
gold is involved.

What the Evil Empire has
done to Latin America and its hundreds of millions of people is the
imposition – by its proctors in high office and its bullying threats
involving capital – of market colonialism that has had the effect of
imprisoning and enslaving the masses. Neo-liberal ideology has indebted
most “third-world” nations, not simply those of Latin America, and it has
furthered indigence, lack of education, the corrosive caste system upon
which millions are born into, inequality, injustice, hunger, disease,
suffering, loss of opportunity and death.

Latin American nations
have been made worse off since the inception of neo-liberal economic models
forcefully imposed by the Evil Empire. As a result, labor has been made
cheaper for US corporations, translating into cheaper goods for its
citizens. Through the back-breaking slave labor, conditions and wages Latin
Americans are exploited so that we in the rich north can consume to our
hearts content. Yet millions upon millions live in squalor, surviving day
to day, usually earning less than two dollars a day, living in feeble
conditions and without the chance of ever improving their lives due to the
non-existence of opportunity.

The Evil Empire’s
domination of Latin America (for more detail please see my January 12th
article, Not in Our Backyard) has resulted in the mass migration
towards our borders. When mechanisms such as NAFTA and neo-liberal tools
are put in place in countries such as Mexico, only the elite benefit and
profit. Everyone else is made worse off; jobs are meager, scarce and
dehumanizing. US subsidies to agriculture have devastated rural farmers and
workers in Latin America. When these people leave for the cities they find
that employment is non-existent and life unbearable. The push to migrate
north, where natives no longer perform the jobs of hard labor, is
tremendous.

Thus, today we see
millions of undocumented workers living in the US. It is the Evil Empire’s
imposed economic models and trade mechanisms that have created the eruption
of Latin slave labor in our nation. Is it any coincidence that the mass
migration north began after NAFTA was imposed on the region? The only
entities that have benefited from NAFTA, both in the US and Mexico, are the
corporations and the few ruling elite. Everyone else has been thrust into
the realm of exploitation and failure.

The near enslavement of
Latin America for the benefit of the Evil Empire has devastated millions of
lives, talent and ability. It has created colonized economies, based on US
crony capitalism that has exploited both man and land. Public companies and
utilities have been privatized and subjugated to fit the Leviathan’s goals.
The rich have become richer while the poor poorer, and this has led to the
greatest disparity in wealth the region has ever seen.

The Evil Empire has
created a region that has for the last fifty years been subservient to the
US. Its many puppets and proctors have helped devastate lives and subjugate
the masses. Democracy has historically been an illusion. Fraud, coups,
assassinations, destabilization, dictatorships and a state of perpetual
wretchedness have been used by the Evil Empire as tools to control Latin
America. When the will of the people triumphs, such as in Chile with
Allende, Venezuela with Chavez or Haiti with Aristide, the Evil Empire
imposes its will in order to decimate democracy and maintain a system that
benefits the US, its corporations and the elite.

Social democracy and
economic models that benefit the masses are not allowed to flourish lest
they become a threat to the US. Systems of governance that benefit the
people are never allowed to prosper, lest the “pestilence” gain momentum and
traverse like a virus beyond borders, giving millions of destitute people
hope. Only US style crony capitalism that makes serfs and slaves of the
masses for the greater benefit of the Leviathan and the elite oligarchs can
exist. Only US style debauched democracy can stand, where the will of the
people is silenced and their incredible ability quashed.

The Evil Empire has in
the last fifty years devastated hundreds of millions of lives and we are all
complicit, thanks to the work of our government, in the ruination of lives
and exploitation of human energies.

Lands and People of the
Middle East

With wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the Evil Empire has killed tens of thousands of Arabs
in the last two years. The remnants of cluster bombs and depleted uranium
used by the American war machine have and will continue to kill and maim
thousands more in the coming decades.

US sponsored sanctions
on Iraq, in essence nothing more than a cruel form of economic genocide that
was imposed in the aftermath of Gulf War I, unleashed its inherent evils for
the next decade, resulting in the death of up to a million men, women and
children who were denied basic necessities needed for survival. This form
of crime against humanity enforced by the Evil Empire was in essence a
quasi-concentration camp in which a million humans perished due to the
American government’s collective punishment on an entire population.

Iraq, needless to say,
has suffered tremendously both by the one-time American lackey whose
tyrannical dictatorship led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians
and by US wars and sanctions. The Evil Empire has made the Cradle of
Civilization a walking wasteland of death, suffering and destruction, a
barren desert whose fertility has been eroded.

For years the people of
Iran were forced to endure the horrors and despotism of the shah, an
American proctor and puppet that subjected his people to tyranny, oppression
and exploitation. Democracy was subverted, many innocent civilians were
killed or disappeared and the nation fell into decay while the shah and his
cronies basked in the splendor of oil’s rewards. When the masses finally
revolted, the American embassy was attacked and destroyed, a clear symbol of
who the people thought was responsible for their misery. The Great Satan
was purged from the lands of Persia and to this day has not returned.

Today, Saudi Arabia is
controlled by a US-protected monarchy loyal to its masters. Meanwhile, the
people linger in growing poverty and desperation. Democracy is
non-existent, as are freedoms and liberties. As a result, many living below
human dignity are turning toward resistance and resentment that is
manifesting itself in a growing hatred of both the Saud monarchy and
American “Crusaders” despoiling sacred Muslim lands.

In Turkey, the Kurdish
minority has for years been ethnically cleansed by the Turkish government.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died and many more maimed and injured
thanks to the vast, modern and sophisticated array of weapons and military
hardware provided by the Evil Empire, who has turned a blind eye to the
genocide and repression that has brought misery and suffering to the Kurds
of Turkey. The Empire’s failure to act in the face of such crimes against
humanity and its approval of arms sales to the Turkish military makes it
complicit in the systemic annihilation and plight of the Kurdish people.

Through one-sided
political support for the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by
Israel against the occupied and oppressed Palestinian people, the Evil
Empire’s hands are smeared in the blood of a people robbed of their land,
raped of their livelihood and dehumanized of their existence. It is
American Apache helicopters, Abrams tanks, Caterpillar bulldozers, fast
missiles, smart bombs, weapons and bullets that are decimating an entire
population, making prisoners of millions who now live in Bantustans and
ghettos.

This, along with
billions of dollars in financial and military aid to the Israeli government
has morphed the crimes of the IDF with the interests of the Evil Empire,
forming a Molotov cocktail of destruction, dehumanization and death. The
apartheid wall being built today that is usurping Palestinian land, crops,
water, homes and lives is in large part possible thanks to American taxpayer
money. The Evil Empire’s role in Israel’s treatment of the native
Palestinian people is apparent in the geopolitical protection afforded the
country by the US and its role in vetoing UN condemnations of Israeli
behavior and by its tacit support for Israeli actions in the occupied
territories.

The Evil Empire is once
more involved in the devastation of millions of people who have been robbed
of their lands and lives, live in utter decay and dehumanization, suffer
severe forms of collective punishment and are being ethnically cleansed in a
most meticulous and abhorrent way. Palestinians are today living in a state
of apartheid, in ghettos resembling large concentration camps, under the
watchful eyes of a trigger-happy occupying force, struggling to survive on
the measly crumbs Israel throws their way and with the knowledge that their
endemic and ruinous plight is endorsed by the greatest “purveyor of
democracy” and “defender of human rights” the world has ever seen.

In Central Asia, the
Evil Empire is systematically forging alliances with a new group of
tyrannical dictators that have subjugated their people to despotism. In
these nations, democracy is dwindling, freedoms are hardly existent and the
decay of liberties is being exacerbated. Torture, death, misery and poverty
are hallmarks of the new group of dictators now entrenched in the pockets of
the US government. It seems that when vast oil wealth is involved the US
altruistic fight for democracy is a principle that is easily disposed of and
forgotten. The struggle for human rights and dignity the US so boldly
declares as a priority is erased and ignored.

The Evils Done in our
Name

The devastation of
peoples throughout the planet directly or indirectly sponsored by the Evil
Empire, who through no fault of their own are denied rights, freedoms and
democracy, are subjected to gross human rights violations and persecutions
and face death or disappearance is a crime against humanity. It is state
sponsored terrorism and genocide. Market colonialism has decimated both
countries and the lives of their inhabitants. Economic genocide has wrought
suffering and increased indigence, robbing millions of education,
healthcare, opportunity and livable wages. The world’s people have in many
instances been enslaved to cater to the interests of the Evil Empire and its
minions.

The evils done in our
name have created worldwide animosity and hatred. They have given rise to
desperation and humiliation that is today manifested by the growing number
of humans fighting the system that has been imposed onto them. From Al-Qaeda
to Iraqi freedom fighters to the Venezuelan poor to enlightened Europeans to
the growing number of sprouting “terror” groups franchising around the
world, the people of the world are growing frustrated at the Evil Empire’s
devastation of peoples in order to suit its interests, both corporate and
governmental.

Billions are searing in
anger at the US government and by indirect complicity at its citizens as
well. We are no longer welcome neighbors in the community of nations. To
be American is to be scorned and castigated, to be unwelcome in the lands of
the exploited and subjugated. The evils done in our name are beginning to
have karmic repercussions throughout the globe, and the danger now present
will affect us all who have been made blind to the crimes against humanity
and the planet being committed by the Evil Empire.

In the last 200 years
the United States has killed, directly or indirectly, tens of millions of
human beings, surpassing the horrors of evildoers past and present. It has
created untold levels of suffering and depravity, sending untold millions to
the sewers of poverty and dehumanization. These truths are not easy to
swallow, or to accept, yet they are as real as the air we breathe. It is
time we accept the evils done in our name.

George W. Bush is but
the latest in a long line of presidents who have continued the cycle of
violence our nation has such a propensity towards. America, it seems,
gravitates naturally towards violence and destruction, perhaps due to the
fact that besides 9/11, we have never seen the true horrors of what man is
capable of unleashing onto his fellow man. The reality that afflicts
billions is to us a distant haze of blurriness. We have not been made privy
to the suffering and misery, the death, disease and maiming of a land in
war, an environment in flames and a people in battle. Our luck has been the
world’s misfortune.

Our society has been
made blind to endemic and ceaseless worldwide suffering at the hands of our
government. Through years of conditioning we now fail to blink at the
carnage our military engenders around the world. From the cradle to the
grave we are subjected to incessant violence, whether real or fictional,
that makes us immune to the torment prevalent in the rest of the world.
Through careful manipulation we are made to believe that war is peace,
destruction is prosperity and murder is life.

The world burns while we
live lives of consumption and production, happy worker bees stuck in hour
long commutes working most of our productive lives. We live in peace and
harmony at home, distracted from reality by our television screens and movie
theatres, by our lavish lifestyles and wasteful society. In the land of the
individual the communality of peoples is an alien principle. Content,
conformist and passive thanks to our nation of plenty, we care not for
peoples outside our borders. We have everything we need, after all, and a
plethora of distractions in our daily lives prevents us from even
considering that a larger world exists beyond our shores.

The
impenetrable bubble we live in protects us from empathizing with billions
whose lives have been made worse since the birth of the Evil Empire. We
have been made ignorant to that which has been unleashed onto the world and
that owes its existence to our continued lifestyle and complicity by
acquiescence and failure to act. The Evil Empire runs rampant through the
planet, devouring all in its path, enslaving millions and conquering and
despoiling lands. Meanwhile, inside the belly of the beast we sit, basking
in extravagance and splendor, complacent in life and circumstance, unwilling
to open our eyes and minds to the evils done in our name.